I am using RH7 HTML for a very large project (over 4500 pages). We generally publish 3 to 5 times a week, depending on the number of updates that have been added. Lately (within the past 6 months or so), the time it take to publish has increased from 45 minutes to an hour up to 2 or more hours. If I was not the last person to publish, it can take up to 4 hours. I noticed yesterday that it seems to be getting hung up on the bsscftp.txt. I can see that rate per minute going steadily down, which means that it's not really doing anything. Then after a while, it kicks back in and completes. If I only have a few pages that were updated, this is not a huge issue, but when I wasn't the last person to publish and the project publishes every single page, publishing becomes an all day event.

We are publishing to a file server and have the project on source control. Only one other person has access to the project. She publishes only rarely because of the time involved. Is there anything to do to speed this up or bypass the bsscftp.txt?

You need to separate the creation of the WebHelp output with the publishing part of it to determine where the chokepoint is. I would try just creating the WebHelp by itself & then try FTPing the files up to your server. That would then point the finger at which point the slowdown occurs/

In addition to what Jeff advised, I will also point out that we see a fair number of help authors that consider Generating and Publishing to be one and the same. Often, these folks will configure the Output folder to be where they want the final output to end up. In this case, totally bypassing the Publishing bit and combining the Generation and Publishing into a single action. An action that is fraught with issues.

So to be totally clear, you perform two steps.

You generate. That generated output is like baking cookies or muffins and should always be to your local drive. You bake the raw ingredients into what the end user consumes. Generating then results in the cookies or muffins sitting on the top of the stove.

Once they have cooled, you PUBLISH (which is very much like moving the cookies or muffins to the cookie jar or the display case where the end users may consume them.).

Actually, I am generating each time before publishing. I am not seeing the slow down in the generating part. That generally takes 30 to 45 minutes which used to be the longest part of the whole process because it is compiling all of the topics. What I am seeing is that even if I only make changes to 7 or so of the topics (like I did yesterday), the publishing part is taking up to 2 hours. That's where the bsscftp.txt is showing up and slowing things down.

Ok, so you've isolated it to the publishing part. Now try doing an FTP to your server and see if that's "fast" - if it's not, then you know the issue is in the network connection; if it is, then you know it's the lame FTP client that's built into RH. Then you have to see if making changes to topics, saving the project, then exiting out and coming back in makes any difference.

That's a good question, but no. I have been watching the progress as it publishes. It is only publishing the changes that I have made, not the whole project. However, if my counterpart publishes on one day and I come back in and publish the next, all topics will be published. Then it just takes forever.

RoboHelp seems to re-create the bsscftp.txt file when it publishes if it has gone missing. I'm curious if you have tried simply deleting or renaming it? Maybe if you did that it would speed things along?